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Topic Review (Newest First)

11-14-2011 06:51 PM

Frank101

Well I didn;t intend to condescend and I apologize if I came off as dismissive.

So you don't support conservative efforts to legislate their moral values upon 310+ million people?

I disagree with your characterization, implying liberals don't do the same thing. I concede that conservatives want to limit freedom of association when it comes to gay marriage and things like that but at the same time liberals insist on taking more money to fund charity that is much less efficient when done through government bureaucracy. Both camps are willing to initiate force by the coercive power of the government to instill on others there values and beliefs. I oppose the use of government power to force any belief on anyway. The role is to protect contracts, individual rights, property rights, and essentially following the Constitution for a change, Ideally a rollback of federal encroachment on private lives would be a great improvement.

is the part where it seems, in conversation, at least in text, that hes annoyed I brought it up. I respect others' rights to disagree, its part of healthy discussion but when you use an expletive to start a sentence, I took it as annoyance, and to claim central planners can better determine whats best for 310+million people seems to be conjecture, and that is where I disagree.

No, the annoyance is when someone assumes I don't understand how our current healthcare system came to be, like I just didn't spend the first half of 2010 being bombarded with policital healthcare rhetoric. The other annoyance is the allegiance to Ron Paul's naivete. He's right to criticize the status quo, and makes a lot of good moral arguments, but almost always offers something worse as an alternative. That is annoying.

11-14-2011 01:56 PM

snowjeeper

So you don't support conservative efforts to legislate their moral values upon 310+ million people?

OMFG...I know how we got our current health insurance system. It should be replaced with something along the lines of single payer. Not left to the market where a quarter or more of the current population dies as the market corrects itself. His economic policies also don't account for corruption, cheating, and market irrationality. Even if his free-market fallacy did have some validity, again it would take a generation to correct itself, leaving a majority of the population in poverty. What are his prescriptions for regulating derivatives? Debt-leverage limits? Leverage was at dangerous levels of 40:1 during the hyperinflated asset bubble, would he limit it at 2:1? or allow 1000:1? He doesn't get it. He's quasi-anti-capital but he's for privitization and an ownership class? How does that even work?

is the part where it seems, in conversation, at least in text, that hes annoyed I brought it up. I respect others' rights to disagree, its part of healthy discussion but when you use an expletive to start a sentence, I took it as annoyance, and to claim central planners can better determine whats best for 310+million people seems to be conjecture, and that is where I disagree.

11-14-2011 12:26 AM

C.B.

my post is concerning financial regulation. speaking from a small banking individual.

the problem with over regulation of fiances(which is part of the problem if you would bieleve it) is that the more federal regulation you put on it the more you push the entire market into big banks.

The fdic comes and does exams on all these small family run banks, who don't have the money and recources to keep up with current FDIC regulations. If you have 2 financially bad years the FDIC will come, take over your bank, and sell it to the highest bidder(usually one of your big shit banks)

but big banks can't fail, even though most of the mortgage crisis can be pinned on there backs.

11-13-2011 11:46 PM

Frank101

Don't get all bent out of shape because I gave a history lesson on policy. I didn't think you did know the history because if you did, I can't see how anyone would logically conclude that the government just needs a bit more power and authority here and there to do it right this time. I brought up healthcare because the current debacle comes from politicians believing they knew better than the consumer and thus the market as to how to regulate and distribute it. You don't think markets regulate themselves, yet you have faith in politicians and regulatory agencies who are corruptible and flawed and consistently regulate in favor of special interests and not the country as a whole. Have you ever listened to Milton Friedman on it? He frames the debate quite well. Keynes oversimplified the economy in a simple equation to try and make economics more scientifically sound with formulas. CPI and GDP are not very accurate in ways often perpetuated. Government spending surely increases GDP but what no one defending government spending brings up is that the resources the government spent came from somewhere and it is merely moving money from one sector to another, usually politically connected.

Your financial leveraging anecdote further supports a freer market than you care to see. When an outside entity declares ratio X is acceptable that makes the consumer/depositor less involved and given a false sense of security. Does a depositor really give a shit what a bank does with their money? If they did they would move there money elsewhere, they don't care what happens to their deposits because it is FDIC insured. Now I am not against insurance on deposits, but having the government back it creates moral hazard. Whereas private insurance companies could compete with reputations, standards, and giving depositors more options and giving an added check on bank deposits This could all be summarized for the laymen as well. One thing I applaud OWS for encouraging is moving your money out of the major banks involved and putting it into Federal credit unions or local banks. Consumers voting with the wallets, I like a lot.

The same thing goes for other types of government created moral hazard. Typically coastal regions are more prone to flooding, insurance premiums should be extremely expensive if offered at all, if they aren't available, the market is saying don't build next to the fucking water. Instead the government comes in and subsidizes the insurance, and typically rich people benefit because they can afford the expensive real estate near the coasts. To add insult to injury, when a disaster does occur, the rest of the states have to bail out the other states who decided to say fuck it lets ask the Feds for grants, while the state should have handled their internal affairs themselves (fortifying walls/levies, evacuation procedures etc..)

Fema is a great misapplication of resources. Also, there were restrictions on "price gouging" during Katrina. there are numerous stories of people from other states offering to sell generators and other goods to people who wanted them and were willing to pay high premiums.

Quote:

John Shepperson was one of the "gougers" authorities arrested. Shepperson and his family live in Kentucky. They watched news reports about Katrina and learned that people desperately needed things.

Shepperson thought he could help and make some money, too, so he bought 19 generators. He and his family then rented a U-Haul and drove 600 miles to an area of Mississippi that was left without power in the wake of the hurricane.

He offered to sell his generators for twice what he had paid for them, and people were eager to buy. Police confiscated his generators, though, and Shepperson was jailed for four days for price-gouging. His generators are still in police custody.

So did the public benefit? Here's the real question: What is the best way to deal with shortages after a natural disaster?

"Any time there is a natural disaster, or a hurricane, an earthquake, the price of the things that people desperately want to have -- batteries, flashlights, generators, water or milk -- they go up. Or they disappear," said economist Russ Roberts. If sellers don't raise prices, supplies vanish. Anxious buyers line up and often buy more than they need, just in case. Those not at the front of the line may get nothing.

"More people want to buy it than there is stuff available. … What do you do? How do you solve that problem? And how do you find out who should get those scarce items," Roberts asked.

The answer is you allow people to raise prices -- even to "gouge" -- because only people who REALLY need them will cough up the money. Gouging also encourages greedy entrepreneurs to rush in with much-needed goods, or to look for more supplies.

The politicians' typical solution is anti-gouging laws or capping prices. During the 1970s gas crisis, that's what the government did. What happened then?

"It was a disaster. It led to long lines, and you couldn't get gasoline," Roberts said.

Economics 101, demand is high price is raised to reach equilibrium in supply and vice versa. The government is essentially saying, "no, we want taxes paid to us from other states to subsidize you. we want to declare martial law and take your only means to self defense during a disaster." The government is not there to help you despite how good the intentions may seem, if you are an American you are not free, or free in the sense that you are led to believe. You are not allowed to freely associate, enter voluntary trade agreements with other consenting and willing adults, and you do not own your labor. If you are rich you get lighter sentences, if you are poor and minority especially you get hit harder with drug offenses. However, most of the reason people can gamble with leveraged money is because the FED Creates the cheap credit, allowing for such a wide ratio to be feasible which further inflates speculative bubbles. End the FED, its robbing Americans blind and most people don't even realize.

11-13-2011 11:03 AM

david_z

The anthology is dedicated to Hess, and it includes two of his essays, but no, I wouldn't say that familiarity with Hess is a prereq. He was an interesting character, high-school dropout turned journalist/speech writer, etc... but I have only read a few of his essays, but he has a way with words that have always struck a chord with me:

"Liberty is a space in which people may live. It does not tell you how they will live. It says, eternally, only that we can."

OMFG...I know how we got our current health insurance system. It should be replaced with something along the lines of single payer. Not left to the market where a quarter or more of the current population dies as the market corrects itself. His economic policies also don't account for corruption, cheating, and market irrationality. Even if his free-market fallacy did have some validity, again it would take a generation to correct itself, leaving a majority of the population in poverty. What are his prescriptions for regulating derivatives? Debt-leverage limits? Leverage was at dangerous levels of 40:1 during the hyperinflated asset bubble, would he limit it at 2:1? or allow 1000:1? He doesn't get it. He's quasi-anti-capital but he's for privitization and an ownership class? How does that even work?

Ron Paul would be a great politician...if he was representing the hillbillies of the 1800's. He doesn't understand the complexity of our current financial system, he thinks people should look to charity for health care, or die, and he thinks people can homeschool their kids, and they'll still become engineers and doctors with the standards we still have today, without ever raising the question of merit. Noone scrutinizes this guy, they give him softball questions, and they smile and tell him have a nice day because he is a non-contender. What's even more disturbing are people who seriously agree with the shit he says. They have no practical application in reality.

I'm sorry you are so uninformed on his policy and understanding of economics and markets. He was predicting the housing bubble years before it imploded the only other person who get media attention that I am aware of predicting the crash YEARS before it happened is Peter Schiff, but neither of them were taken seriously and literally laughed at on MSM.

Also, Dr. Paul worked in healthcare prior to medicaid and medicare during his residency and says no one was turned away when he worked at the church for peanuts. He understands the "complexities of our financial system" more than pseudo-economists like Krugman. Economics is partly the study of incentives and when you have government price fixing, mandating, regulation an industry up all over the place, it creates various kinds of unintentional consequences. For example, during WW2 price and wage controls were set in along with rationing and various other measures. As a result, companies competing for higher skilled workers needed a different way to incentive employees to remain and stay. They lobbied to be able to afford health insurance to their employees since the wage was capped. (This is all heavily documented, although for whatever reason no one learns of this in public school history class). So instead of having private insurance you can carry with you from job to job if you chose to buy it, you lost your insurance when leaving a job. Now say you developed a condition in the transition of getting new insurance, you suffer from preexisting condition premiums when you decide to re-buy an insurance, rather than developing the condition while insured which negates the preexisting condition.

This morphed into what we have today. Insurance covers doctor visits, preventative care, meds, the typical customer pays a small copay. They have no incentive to shop around for generics, different physicians because it doesn't matter where they go, their individual copay remains the same. The cost of lasik surgery has drastically been reduced since its invention for technological reasons but also because it isn't typically covered in insurance programs. The same goes for contacts, contacts become cheaper and better despite insurance not covering them BECAUSE the incentive to produce them is on the consumer. When insurance or medicare/caid covers medication the prices generally keep rising because drug companies know they can lobby to get covered and therefore charge whatever they want on the skewed market, coupled with government granted monopoly (AKA patent) rights, there is virtually no incentive for a pharmaceutical company to offer a lower price to consumers when they are subsidized.

Also, I'm not going to reiterate the points made by a few of the commentators in your huffpo link. RP recognizes that in today's day and age with inflation, restrictions on medication and medical practices, the licensing cartel of the AMA, and a slew of other things that keep healthcare costs so high, it is impractical to abolish everything all at once, there needs to be a transition period which is what the poster before me was talking about. Huffpo skews Paul's beliefs saying if he had his way everything would be abolished in social safety nets. Unfortunately this is untrue and hes stated his position accurately many times, though you would never hear of it because it makes Ron Paul look good to voters and bad for MSM and special interests. People were already forcibly taxed to pay for their retirement benefits of SS medicare/caid, it would be wrong to break contract.

Its incredible how many times government tries, with the best of intentions to help the worse off in society, and it has the opposite or negative effects many times.

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